Tonight we rolled out a new Bloglines feature called email subscriptions. Basically, an email subscription is like a normal subscription, except that each one comes with a unique Bloglines email address associated with it. The email address is not easily guessable (hard to spam). Whenever an email is received for one of these email addresses, it appears just like a normal blog entry. We support HTML email and even embedded images.

Or 12 new warm servers, to be exact. The hungry beast that is Bloglines continues to grow and is demanding more horsepower. When I first started ONElist, there was a period where we had to stop allowing new user registration because the system was so overloaded. That was a very painful lesson that we were luckily able to fully recover and learn from. I vowed then to never get back into a situation like that.

I’m getting ready for my private pilot checkride. Today my instructor and I flew from Palo Alto over to Hayward to practice short-field landings. I don’t quite have the hang of those yet, and it was good practice. On the way back to Palo Alto, the Hayward tower announced that a plane had gone down with an emergency. It was last on the radar near Coyote Hills, which was directly in front of us.

I’ve been extra busy over the past couple of weeks. Bloglines continues to grow and add features. We will be moving the servers to a new colocation facility in the next few weeks, and at the same time we will be adding several new machines (and replacing some old ones). All of that takes a lot of time. And we continue to add new features based on the great feedback from our users.

Very good article on Salon yesterday called That 1994 Feeling about RSS and syndication. Syndication and aggregation are unfamiliar concepts to many people; a lot of education still needs to happen. This article is a good step in that direction. And I’m of course grateful that Scott mentions Bloglines. User testimonials are the best kind of advertising.

Interesting data on aggregator hits by Mark. He doesn’t mention Bloglines, but I pointed out in the comments to that entry that he has 456 subscribers who read his site through us. Now the numbers aren’t exactly apples to apples. You could argue that just by counting unique IPs, as he did, that there will be some amount of overcounting, due to people hitting his site from multiple IPs due to dynamic IP addressing.

Over the weekend, we pushed a couple of changes to the internal architecture of Bloglines. The changes were designed to off-load work from one of the databases (the Bloglines back-end consists of several different databases, spread over multiple machines). While the system was fairly responsive before the changes, these changes will help us continue to scale up. Last week was our best week so far, in terms of traffic and user growth.

We launched a new feature for Bloglines yesterday, search feeds. You can search on something and then subscribe to that search. It appears as a normal subscription and whenever new items are received that match your search, they show up. In other Bloglines news, this is so cool, I could pop: Hmmm…I wonder how many people have “taught” Bloglines. I did today, showing my students the wonders of aggregation and setting them all up with accounts.

Came across the following this evening: “Client side aggregators are so 2002.”

Yesterday, I had my first aerobatic flying experience. I went up in N117PS, a Pitts Special S/2B owned by Attitude Aviation in Livermore. I have always thought that Pitts biplanes were cool, and I was right. The thing is a rocket. Extremely responsive. Think about turning, and it happens. There’s very little forward visibility (ie. none), so you have to work around that, especially when landing. First we did some aileron rolls.